From c843966c556d7370bb32e7319a6d164cb8c70ae2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Johannes Weiner Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2020 16:02:37 -0700 Subject: mm: allow swappiness that prefers reclaiming anon over the file workingset With the advent of fast random IO devices (SSDs, PMEM) and in-memory swap devices such as zswap, it's possible for swap to be much faster than filesystems, and for swapping to be preferable over thrashing filesystem caches. Allow setting swappiness - which defines the rough relative IO cost of cache misses between page cache and swap-backed pages - to reflect such situations by making the swap-preferred range configurable. Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Cc: Joonsoo Kim Cc: Michal Hocko Cc: Minchan Kim Cc: Rik van Riel Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200520232525.798933-4-hannes@cmpxchg.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst | 23 ++++++++++++++++++----- 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) (limited to 'Documentation') diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst index 0329a4d3fa9e..d46d5b7013c6 100644 --- a/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst +++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/sysctl/vm.rst @@ -831,14 +831,27 @@ tooling to work, you can do:: swappiness ========== -This control is used to define how aggressive the kernel will swap -memory pages. Higher values will increase aggressiveness, lower values -decrease the amount of swap. A value of 0 instructs the kernel not to -initiate swap until the amount of free and file-backed pages is less -than the high water mark in a zone. +This control is used to define the rough relative IO cost of swapping +and filesystem paging, as a value between 0 and 200. At 100, the VM +assumes equal IO cost and will thus apply memory pressure to the page +cache and swap-backed pages equally; lower values signify more +expensive swap IO, higher values indicates cheaper. + +Keep in mind that filesystem IO patterns under memory pressure tend to +be more efficient than swap's random IO. An optimal value will require +experimentation and will also be workload-dependent. The default value is 60. +For in-memory swap, like zram or zswap, as well as hybrid setups that +have swap on faster devices than the filesystem, values beyond 100 can +be considered. For example, if the random IO against the swap device +is on average 2x faster than IO from the filesystem, swappiness should +be 133 (x + 2x = 200, 2x = 133.33). + +At 0, the kernel will not initiate swap until the amount of free and +file-backed pages is less than the high watermark in a zone. + unprivileged_userfaultfd ======================== -- cgit v1.2.3-58-ga151